The Morphology and Clinical Application Core (The Core) is a critical component of The Center. It serves three major functions: First, it maintains a comprehensive tissue bank, which includes human normal kidney tissue and kidney tissue with a large varieties of renal disease characterized by inflammation and makes them available to individual projects of The Center or to the human translational studies conducted by The Core. Second it helps analyze tissue samples generated from the individual projects of The Center. This function may include routine tissue preparation, electron microscopy, immunostaining, in situ hybridization, morphometry, interpretation of the morphologic findings, and laser capture microscopy. Third, it tests the human relevance of the findings or the concepts generated from individual projects. For example, the idea that Smac 7 overexpression attenuates inflammation through suppression of NF-kappaB in a murine model of antiglomerular basement membrane glomerulonephritis will be tested for human relevance by immunostaining human tissue samples with various types of glomerulonephrirtis or tubulointerstitial nephritis for the expresion of Smad 7 and NF-kappaB actvation and correlating these findings with the severity of inflammation, Forth, it tests the hypotnesis that defective apoptosis of the inflammatory cells at site of tissue inflammation may lead to failure of resolution of inflammation and perpetuate the disease. For this purpose, the frequency of apoptotic inflammatory cells and their expression of pro-apoptotic and arnti-apoptotic molecules in the models from each project and in human tissue will be determined and correlated with the general disease activity.